


Thursdays

by Amythe3lder



Series: Irregular Pieces [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Divination, F/M, M/M, Molly ships Johnlock, Platonic Cuddling, Plots, Sharing a Bed, Sherlock Holmes & Molly Hooper Friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 17:50:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2477069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amythe3lder/pseuds/Amythe3lder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Molly gives Sherlock some advice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Razor Perceptions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Leythra](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Leythra).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This first chapter is right between _Undertow_ and _Happiness Shared_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the blue light reflections that color my mind when I sleep  
> And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep  
> All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep  
> Hey I can bleed as well as anyone, but I need someone to help me sleep  
> "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"-Counting Crows

Molly had been Sherlock’s friend for longer than he’d been hers. Before he knew he had friends, before he could recognize that not everyone who helped him wanted something in return, the unassuming woman had been looking after him. He had used her callously, and she had let him. He had believed this was out of some ill-advised love for him and he’d been right- after a fashion- but he’d misread her affection, and he was starting to consider that maybe it hadn’t been unwise of her to care about him after all.

He was working towards putting something real in place of all that false bravado.

During one of their Thursday night ~~cuddles~~ ~~counseling sessions~~ _visits_ last year, while he recovered from a gunshot wound that he had nearly believed he’d deserved, Molly caught him with his guard down and had asked him why he was so deeply suspicious of anyone who sought his company. Exhausted from nightmares and groggy from the pain medicine he’d slurred, “Who’d wanna be ‘round me?”

“Wouldn’t you? If you were someone different, would you be friends with who you are now?”

“Nooonono,” he’d mumbled emphatically.

“You might see about fixing that.”

“...When’d you turn into a ther’pist? Molly,” he’d shaken his head a bit and tried to focus on her, then said slowly, “I am an arsehole.”

“Well yes,” she’d agreed, “but everybody in your life is still here because we know that’s not all you are.”

“Right. I’m a _genius_ arsehole,” he’d declared proudly, and she’d succumbed to a fit of giggles.

When she could talk again, she had suggested that while he didn't need to change who he was, perhaps he could also cultivate his better qualities. “Be someone you wouldn’t cringe to see John spending time with.”

“John’s got terrible taste in friends. Still better than his taste in wives, though.”

*           *           *

Molly was at his door, and there was something different about her. A sadness that she’d always carried had been lifted away. Sherlock had dismissed her tension as intrinsic because so far as he could recall, he’d never seen her without it. Without preamble, he said, “You’ve seen Mycroft today; he mentioned that he had to go view a body when he left here this morning. You told him,” he concluded, “and it went well? Yes. It must have, that’s why you look so…” he gestured at her.

“Happy, Sherlock, she looks happy,” John prompted from the kitchen doorway. He sent her a congratulatory smile and went back to unpacking the miraculously intact glasses.

“I think I’m supposed to ask you about your intentions regarding my brother. Or ask him what he means to do with my pathologist,” the detective mused with mock concern.

Molly said, “I feel like I’m all made up of sunlight.”  

“You look a bit like it, too,” he admitted.

His friend dropped her voice, “Your turn next, Sherlock.” They excused themselves to John and she ushered the detective out into the hallway. “What are we going to do about Thursdays? If it comes to it, I honestly don’t think Mycroft would mind once I explain; he must know about your troubles. So, I'm still available if you need me, but I think you’d be better off moving up your timetable with John.” At his scandalized glare, she clarified, “I’m not saying you ought to shag him yet, just see if he'll hold you. He already knows that we sleep over sometimes. He just doesn't fully understand why.”

“He’s only just moved in this morning. There’s making progress and then there’s rushing headlong into doom,” he looked uncomfortable, “and I haven’t got the faintest idea how to ask him for that.”

“How would you get him to do anything else? Remember how you manipulated  _me_  into sharing a bed with you?”

“Well, there weren’t any linens in John’s old room that first night, and I made false and disparaging remarks about the couch. I took away the other options,” he realized.

“Maybe after a few days, when you know he’ll be gone long enough, get rid of his bed.”

“I could tell him it’s for science. He won’t question it. Much.”


	2. Ghost into a Fog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A flashback to a few hours post-Reichenbach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Round here we talk just like lions  
> But we sacrifice like lambs  
> "Round Here"- Counting Crows

“That went well. Or not, rather.” Sherlock muttered from the shadows, and Molly jumped. She had expected him to be waiting in her flat at the end of this gruelling and horrid day, and had been straining so intently for signs of him that he’d surprised her by speaking.

She’d just signed off on his post-mortem, and had the extraordinarily wrenching experience of seeing stalwart John Watson led away homeward in shock after watching his flatmate plummet to the sidewalk in front of him. It had been all she could do to stay silent, to watch a heart rend and know that she could stop it with a few words that she must leave unuttered. How she was going to sleep with herself was anybody’s guess. It was all right for Sherlock: he would be flitting away to parts undisclosed before the sun rose. Molly would be left here to feed lies to the few friends she had forged true connections with. At least one other person was in on the trick, but she knew better than to hope for much comfort on that front. Since their earlier association had ended, Mycroft Holmes had found little enough use for her. The ache hadn’t passed as she had hoped, just settled slightly to the left of the lungs that would never push the truth out.

Obfuscation seemed to be an ongoing theme.

She felt like she needed a good hot soak, but she would have to settle for a shower instead. If she was going to cry in a bathtub, she’d do so standing up and muffled by the pounding of the water.

Sherlock had already availed himself, she saw, but at least he was relatively tidy in his habits and had hung up his towel. She allowed herself five minutes of quiet sobbing during which she simultaneously shampooed her hair. She was glad of her decision to multitask; Sherlock had used most of her hot water.

When she exited her bedroom in a nightgown dotted with tiny red cardinals, she braced for the snide comment on her tears, home, or attire. She looked for him to be either slumped across her couch or sitting stiff-backed in her recliner, but instead he was kneeling in front of the second-hand bookshelf along the near wall. He said, without turning from her record collection, “That is the oldest television still drawing life off the London power-grid. I would think someone with your social habits would invest in your entertainment. Has it even got a colour display?”

Molly sighed. Her conversations with Sherlock, when they spoke at all, often played out this way. He would dazzle her with careless insults or threadbare compliments, then ask for something. It was her role to accept everything he doled out and keep an eye on him. At least, that was the usual way of them. For the most part, she was content to let things ride however they would, preferring to steer the feral creature clear of destruction by way of subtle misdirection and shiny objects. But this was her own flat, and she had already lied too much today; he didn’t sound like his heart was in the jibe he’d forced out, either. So when she answered, she loosed her grip on her tongue just enough that for once, the gap between what she meant and what she said was a very tight squeeze indeed. “’Everything looks worse in black and white,’” she quipped, quoting a song.

In her mind, she saw her signature on a death certificate superimposed on the fact of his living- if not precisely _warm_ \- presence. She winced at the inescapable fact that whatever else she was doing, she had also falsified documents. The whole scheme made her nervous, but for some reason her sticking point had been not the overlooming threat of harm for her friends if the plan went awry but the paperwork involved. Putting her name on a falsehood had tasted bitter and coppery on the back of her tongue, the same flavour as almost tripping with a trayful of fragile glasses. The surety that she had a shoelace untied and _it would happen_  had coloured the rest of the day surrounding that moment in a patina of anxiety that neatly served to distract her from the actual danger.

Sherlock’s finger stopped on an album, and he tilted it out so she could see that it was Paul Simon. It occurred to her that they might have just communicated properly for the first time in years. Not that he was likely to fully recall the other, sick as he’d been while detoxing. That conversation had been about as one-sided as this one was so far, but at least he had given her a sign that he understood.

He angled his chin to glance up and over at her, and then he paused like he’d forgotten to look away. The skin around his eyes looked smudged with bruises and oddly slack, tired.

_Maybe all of our shoelaces are untied._

Too late, she reflected on her words and wondered if his own train of thought would take him to hateful newsprint. Richard Brook. _Smoke and mirrors_ , she knew, _the kind of trick that always ends in a loud bang and shattered shards_. If she’d spoken up and been heard, it might have helped. Then again. It was no longer an option, as her first priority would be to focus on doing what came naturally: making people forget her. “Will you have a cuppa?” she asked gently.

A memory with claws darted across Sherlock’s face, dragging darkness through his eyes. “Anything but tea just now.”

When she set the coffee on her kitchen table, his was sweetened with sugar and hers with liqueur. His gaze landed first on her mug- nostrils flaring at the smell of alcohol- then raised pointedly to her face. She relented and went back to the fridge for the bottle. She tipped a small measure into his coffee and watched it bloom back upwards from the bottom before replacing the Bailey’s and getting to work making sandwiches. He settled with his back mostly to her, and she decided that the placement was more a sign of trust than a dismissal. Sherlock spoke first, muttered down to his drink, and Molly remembered another Holmes who could only open his mouth if he didn’t watch himself do it. “I hadn’t expected everyone to buy Moriarty’s line _quite_ so easily.”

“Not everybody did.”

“Enough, though.”

“Can’t charm the whole world, Sherlock,” she shrugged, and he made a noise that wasn’t exactly laughter and gulped his coffee to stopper it. Softly, she added, “If you’re a bastard, people will always want you to lose.”

Sherlock said nothing for a long time. Then, “You’ll look in on John. Won’t you?” he added, as if he had some idea of the magnitude of what she was already belted in for, but suddenly doubted how far she was willing to go.

She kept part of her attention on the window while she finished her task, funnelling reheated bean soup into a thermos. She bit the inside of her cheek when she sloshed some onto the worktop. “Um, not sure how I’ll handle fibbing to him.”

He snorted, “It may be true before the week is out.” He sounded determined and ready to meet this challenge, to die if necessary. Privately she worried over his estimation. This first stretch of time would be the hardest for those in and out of the loop.

Molly gave a tight smile to the back of his head and said, “He’s a worthy cause. I’ll do my best for John.” Through the glass, she could see a familiar black car pull up. Mycroft was here to collect the future fugitive.

“He inspires that in me as well. I wish I knew why,” he mumbled, more to himself than anything.

“Well,” she said as she handed him his provisions, “you’ll have some time to think on it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First: the song Molly quotes is "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon.  
> Second: I don't know if there will be future chapters, but some might be forthcoming.  
> Third: The chapter title (which I forgot before, sorry) is also from "Round Here"-Counting Crows.


	3. Down to the Old Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter happens sometime in January 2014, after The Empty Hearse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get right to the heart of matters  
> It's the heart that matters more  
> "Omaha"-Counting Crows

“When I asked for a demonstration, I sort of assumed,” Sherlock dragged the word out longer than Molly felt was necessary and she had to bite down on her lips to conceal a smile between her teeth, “that- I don’t know-”

“That we’d be meeting at midnight in a forgotten graveyard?” 

It hadn't surprised her that he had figured it out; a glance at her bookshelves had probably been all that he needed. What had caught her off-guard had been the lack of dismissive derision. “Show me?” Sherlock had asked, sounding so young and enthusiastic that she had agreed before the option of saying no had ever crossed her mind. 

He pointed at her for emphasis and nodded as she gathered her supplies. “With black velvet capes and candles, yes! Spreading out my fate on a bed of dry leaves. Which would actually pose a fire hazard, I suppose. Hadn’t thought of that.”

Neither had Molly the first time she’d tried an outdoor ritual, and she confided as much. “That’s what the brooms are for,” she revealed in a conspiratorial whisper.

Sherlock regarded her sceptically for a second, then his eyes rounded. “Really?”

“No. Not really.” She gave him a wide grin and he snapped a tea towel at her. “Well,” she relented, “metaphysical dried leaves, if you will. But if there's a need and a proper tool, I do tend to take a practical approach.”

Which must be evident in the current setting. She knew that outwardly, this seemed even more mundane than she viewed it. They had just polished off the dregs of dinner at this table, and now she was clearing it to lay cards for him. After, she would lay herself down next to him, and he would sleep while clinging bruises onto her skin and crying salt into her hair. Surely this was not at all what he’d imagined.

But for the moment, well. Sherlock reminded her of a balloon batted aloft over a floor carpeted with tacks. Averting disaster depended on her ability to keep it light, and that sometimes took more work than was pretty to look at. Being Sherlock’s friend could be- quite frankly- exhausting and was often a thankless occupation, but it was worth it to watch him slowly grow into the best parts of himself. Despite the upward shift in their dynamic following his return to the land of the living, she mourned the events that had necessitated it. Before, Sherlock had been able to ignore the cumbersome debt between them on the grounds that he’d never reached for aid himself, but then he’d been forced to ask her to lie for him when he'd faked his death so dramatically. The Sherlock that had rolled back home was a fragile thing indeed, and she felt the alterations in his fabric like a blade in her gut. His walls had got taller but tissue-paper-thin, and he continued to helplessly point to the weak spots for her to patch. He was having a much harder time reconciling that, and Molly was caught between wanting to tell him that her support was always on the house, and her awareness that it might be good for him to learn to pay his tab.

He started to hand his bowl to her and she lifted an eyebrow at him, already busy shuffling her deck. “Give it a rinse please, Sherlock, potato soup sets up like cement if you leave it. The sink is two paces to your left there. In case you were lost.”

He grumbled about poor hosts. Molly resolved to save this memory for the next time she stayed at his flat.

When he completed his task and plunked down opposite her, she rewarded him with a bright smile and he answered it with a mostly feigned sulk. Even the act didn’t last a full ten seconds. Sherlock couldn't hold a sour mood for long in the face of interesting distractions, mercurial as he was. She hummed a little and cleared out her mind.

“Questions?” she invited, certain that he had already thought of one or two.

Sherlock immediately barreled forth. He was coming into this cold and without even a baseline of knowledge, “So as not to queer the results,” he assured her.

Molly held her breath, let it out. “When I tell you this isn't an exact science, I doubt you can fully appreciate the profundity of the statement. It really isn't, though. Not for me.”

Sherlock scrunched his nose like he wanted to argue on principle, but he backed down. Both parties silently agreed to accept how wrong the other person clearly was. After a pause, he asked, “Is this an auspicious day?”

She shrugged. “It's Thursday.”

“So it doesn't matter where you do this, then?”

“It _can_.” She passed him the deck and told him to cut it. While he did, she added, “Certain times and places may make it easier.”

“To focus?”

She laughed, “To unfocus, more like. But as to your question, I don’t believe that the spirits,” she wiggled her fingers vaguely at the ceiling, “or whatever spins the universe cares one way or another what position the moon is in, or whether I remember all the words to say, or if I do bibliomancy from a copy of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ on the train ride home. It permeates and informs each action and thought. I don’t have to work at it, I need only to stop struggling against it. It’s everywhere, see? It’s all things forever.”

She had been carefully not making eye contact with Sherlock, because she could picture his confused face well enough, when he suddenly made a quiet noise of understanding. She imagined that he could relate, that he would compare it to making deductions, or-

“Like the Tardis,” he said with a nod.

Molly blinked. “Yeah?” she ventured, testing the idea. “Yeah. What I mean to say is that the only location that matters is where your heart is. If it’s in the right place. And if it’s bigger on the inside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A prompt fill for SFPAC. Disclaimer: this is by no means the only way to practice divinatory arts!


	4. Shaking Hands With Darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock had caught himself feeling halfway nostalgic for his exile; it had felt more natural to be a stranger in a strange land than at home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place in early March, between TEH and TSoT  
> Your voice on the phone  
> The blood from a stone  
> And these tears that I can't understand  
> If I could heal  
> The guilt I don't feel  
> Oh by silently giving my hand  
> "All My Failures"-Counting Crows

Molly blinked at Sherlock, but opened the door wider and let him in. “I was just coming over to yours,” she said, confused as she dropped her overnight bag and pushed the door shut against the draft.

He knew that it would have been better to warn her, instead of bringing takeaway to apologise for not having done so, but he had been unable to compose a text to answer the inevitable question that her furrowed brow was asking.

“You have an electric blanket.”

“Yes,” Molly agreed, and waited.

He explained, “I don’t like the cold,” and it was technically true, though she could easily have brought it along. Blankets were reasonably portable, even with a cord attached, and his mattress was far superior in size and quality. The reason the flat on Baker Street seemed so much chillier this winter eluded him. At first, he had thought he needed time to reacclimatise to the weather, but the empty stillness only seemed to bother him in his own rooms. He had been back for months, shouldn’t he be more comfortable? Sherlock had caught himself feeling halfway nostalgic for his exile; it had felt more natural to be a stranger in a strange land than at home. The constant bite in the air of his flat certainly wasn’t helping, but he couldn’t locate the source. He’d had a word with Mrs. Hudson about replacing the insulation and she had tutted at him and gave him the same sympathetic look Molly had now. Everyone seemed to know what was troubling him. For once, he wished they’d just tell him and be done with it.

No such luck tonight, it seemed. Molly met his eyes and nodded slowly, ready to swallow whatever excuse he gave. “I can get a fire going too, if you’d like?”

“Whatever,” he mumbled with a shrug. He was too foul-minded to be eloquent at the moment.

“... Right.” She obliged him nonetheless, and he tried to stack the crab rangoon on one of her mismatched plates while she worked. The tower toppled, and he left the wontons as they fell. He liked them that way.

They ate their meal on the sofa, leaning over paper cartons held between their knees. They angled towards each other more to protect the integrity of their playing cards than to ease conversation, which became a discussion of John and coupledom when Molly asked, inanely, “So the wedding is still on, then?”

He squinted at her, faintly irritated. “Of course it’s on.”

“That’s,” Molly cleared her throat,” um, good.” She didn’t quite look like she was sure she agreed with herself, and he was a little surprised.

“Well, you’ve got your... Tom,” he pointed out snagging for a moment on the name. “All of you, pairing up. Two by two.” He caught his mistake when she squirmed uncomfortably.

*          *          *

The fact was, Tom knew nothing at all about their Thursday night visits, because Molly had determined that it was easier to avoid the subject with her fiancé than try to explain. Apparently, she did not expect that Tom would believe their motives were platonic. She had said something about him not thinking friendship was possible between men and women. Sherlock had asked, “How are bisexual people ever meant to have friends?”

Her shoulders had tightened, “I don’t know.” They’d been sitting in his bed then, in between nightmares and flashbacks and cups of herbal tea with more milk than strictly necessary. Molly had forgotten to braid her hair before they fell asleep, and it had got twisted in his hands as he thrashed, remembering in dreams when his own was that long. He had a niggling worry that maybe, he was asking for far too much.

“Does he? Know?”

She had ignored that question in favour of a previous one. “Maybe we aren’t,” she said so softly that he almost hadn’t heard, and so sadly that that would have been preferable.

He had changed the subject so quickly that he sloshed the tea, and insisted that she teach him to braid.

*          *          *

Now she said, “I think two is my least favourite number.”

“Better let me take them off your hands,” Sherlock offered, ever helpful.

She laughed, “Go fish!” and that reminded him.

“Even my brother has managed to find someone, can you imagine?” Mycroft thought he was being very clever, but Sherlock had been tracking the parallels between Lestrade’s and his brother’s smoking habits- and infrequent unavailabilties- for years now, and he finally felt that he had enough data to be considered irrefutable proof.

Molly smiled in a way that seemed entirely unlike a smile in the same way that a sack of flour was not bread and a cloud was not a rainbow. “Oh,” she said. “How nice.” She looked at her moo goo gai pan and set it aside. “Got any threes?” She didn’t sound like she cared that much about the game anymore.

Sherlock wasn’t sure what had upset her, though if pressed he would have guessed that reminding her about her own looming nuptials was probably a factor, though the timing was off.

She was shivering slightly, her toes pale and curled under. He scooted closer and adjusted the blanket around her shoulders so they could share it, and her smile had a measure of truth to it this time.

“You just want to sneak a peek at my hand,” she sniffed. “Won’t work”

“No, indeed,” he agreed. Her cards were hard to read, clutched to her chest as they were, but he wished for her sake someone would bother to try. Sherlock couldn’t fathom why Molly was committed to marrying someone who fundamentally did not know her. In Sherlock’s opinion, Tom’s greatest failing- among several- was that he hadn’t really noticed how little he understood. He reasoned that it was none of his concern until it interfered with his own sleeping arrangements, but he did want to see his friend happy.

Deep in the night, in the long trudge towards dawn, Sherlock heard the sounds of muffled sobbing filtering into his conscious mind. It wasn’t him.

Molly was facedown beside him, making little enough noise that she must have noticed the change in his breathing when he came fully awake. They both froze for a minute, and then he reached out and laid a hand on Molly’s back as she had done countless times in his place. He felt a bit less broken when she relaxed into the touch. She made no move to come closer to him, but she let him soothe her while she cried nameless tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole song just kills me. Go [listen to "All My Failures"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VkydQaw5gY) and let it kill you too.


	5. She Comes Out of Closets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set after TAB, and immediately following the last section of 4 of _Undertow_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could've been anyone, you see  
> I wish it was anyone but me  
> There's nothin' but pills and ashes under my skin  
> "American Girls"-Counting Crows

Into the silence Molly left when she admitted that she didn’t always heed the warning, that sometimes even nice girls end up in bed with criminal masterminds, Mycroft Holmes spoke up, “Miss Hooper, do you have any naloxone?”

She had already given Sherlock enough of an assessment to be unsurprised. She could pull a lot of information from the sickly sheen of drying sweat and the vague feverish cast to her friend's eyes. _Shit_. “Sherlock, will you give me a hand in the clos- er... storage… room? Please?”

Sherlock managed half of an eye-roll before he got bored with it, and slouched his way along behind her. Once they were shut in amongst the boxes of gloves and slides, he bent his head low and grumbled, “Subtlety isn’t your forte.”

“Maybe I should stop trying to be subtle, then,” she rejoined, then aimed her tone for the narrow ledge between reproach and resignation. “You said you were done.”

Sherlock laughed gracelessly. “You know, I very nearly meant it.” He started fiddling with things on shelves that she couldn’t reach without a step stool, wiping through the thin dust until he had enough to rub between his fingers. “It’s for a-”

“No,” she cut him off. “It’s not for a case, it’s not. You took drugs to- what- to figure out that your nemesis is bigger than one person? Anyone could have told you that; wholesale bad intentions and ill-repute was sort of his marketing technique.”

It was at this point that Sherlock turned nasty. “Well, you had to sleep with him to figure out that he was a bad idea. You would know more about his technique than most.” She let it roll off as best she could. By now, she could chart the half-life of Sherlock’s more illicit remedies for anguish by his attitude, so she mentally ticked off boxes and moved her itinerary ahead.

It didn't bother her that she’d shagged Jim Moriarty, not especially. To be sure, knowing what she did now made her gut twist and her skin itch, but she imagined that she wasn't the only person who’d gone to bed with someone and woken up with someone else. Not by a long shot.

So to speak.

What was upsetting was how much she’d actually cared for him before she learned the truth. That a man who _did not exist_ had managed to get his hands so near to her heart affected her more than the other thing. It made her doubt.

She decided that the best course of action was to lead the conversation back to the problem. “It’s not just you that you’re hurting.”

His head didn’t snap up, but it probably took effort. “John?” It almost made her smile that his first thought was for the man he loved. There were so many layers of regret and longing under the patina of constructed neutrality in his voice that she wanted to wrap him in a blanket on her settee and watch musicals with him until he cheered himself up nitpicking the differences between _My Fair Lady_ and _Pygmalion_. She would never be done looking after this mad bugger, and that meant battening down the hatches. Things were going to get worse in the next month or so.

She choked down what might have emerged as a heavy sigh, if she’d had the time to spare for that. “ _And_ him, yes.”

Sherlock threw his hands up as well as he could in the tight space. “Oh. _Mycroft_. Tell me, was any of this nonsense ever for me?”

Molly held her breath and thought of late nights and early mornings spent seated across from Mycroft, whether over a table or Sherlock’s fitfully resting form. She thought of a mouth too tired to frown, of fingernail beds blue from exhaustion, of a man who couldn’t speak except to tell her stories of a shared childhood, to show her snapshots from the family album in words: _this is my little brother young, here he is happy, this is when he was whole, I don’t know how to fix it, please help._ She remembered poor eating habits, interrupted sleeping patterns, and dehydration patched up with too much coffee gone cold and greasy. Worst of this, she didn’t need to reach all that far back, because she had just seen Mycroft, and he looked awful. Again. _Worried sick_ was not just an expression, and Mycroft could pose for the visual.

To Sherlock, she said, “Of course, sometimes even primarily. How many people do you need to have completely devoted to only you before you’re satisfied?”

He said, “Just the one would be- would have _been_ plenty.” He waited a few seconds, looked away and said, “I dreamed of you. You had a mustache.”

A giggle sneaked around Molly’s determination to be serious. “That’s odd, I always thought I was more suited for a beard.” Nothing was ever so blessed as silent laughter in a supply cupboard. “You have a chance,” she said, when they had calmed down, “a real chance at getting what you want.” _One of us should_.

“John Watson is married,” Sherlock ground out slowly, like each syllable had a foot across his throat. “Very married, with a baby on the way.”

“And if you think that's all there is to it, then you’re not paying attention.” She opened the door and Mycroft and John stopped whispering. John, at least, looked as conspicuously guilty as a misbehaving schoolboy. Molly arched an eyebrow at Sherlock: _see_? But she wasn’t sure he did.

She went to her purse and fished around for a second in the interior pocket before coming up with a pouch covered in tiny white rabbits. The symbolism had been a deliberate choice. “You had it in your bag all along,” Mycroft murmured.

“You know I always have a dose handy,” she said and John peered sharply at her, curious and hesitating on the edge of aimless jealousy. From behind her, Sherlock made protests while no one listened. “He’s come down already. Most of the way,” she pointed out, a little flustered at all the attention she was commanding today.

“All the same, can you spare some? For Doctor Watson? For myself? For… next time. In case.”

Mycroft held her gaze for just a moment, but it was long enough for Molly to be warmed by it, to feel his regard tighten muscles low in her belly, to know herself for a fool. She’d been going about this all wrong. Distance and time weren’t helping, only factoring into a helpless velocity. There was no scrubber that could hasten his path out of her system.

Sooner or later, something would have to give, and Molly knew with dreadful certainty that it would be her.

Her own secrets were always so much harder to keep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, I have TAB feels. I did the math and 1 Jan 2015 was a Thursday. Too good to pass up.  
> Thanks to NotIdiotProof for Britpicking!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Strands of Fist and Bone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6618874) by [tiltedsyllogism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltedsyllogism/pseuds/tiltedsyllogism)




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